Once you’re fully immersed in trading, reading and contributing to them will become like second nature to you. Firstly, it’s important to note how changeable these trading trends tend to be. What is going on around us will have a direct effect on trading activity. To view a Forex chart, you’ll want to open up your software and decide on a currency pair. Once you have picked this, you’ll then need to identify the period interval at which it will update, for example once a day. Once you have entered your currency pair, time period and data range, you will be faced with a chart that at first might be difficult to read. The default model used across all marketplaces is the candlestick chart, so it seems like a good place to start.

These look similar to the bar graphs you may have studied in school, and are not so different in practice. You will notice that the shapes on the page look like candles, and they may be in different colours with additional data surrounding them. Candle charts are used frequently in trading to demonstrate the open, close, high and low prices, in this case it will demonstrate the date corresponding to the currency pair you have selected, for your specified time period. Put simply, the body of the candle shows the open and close prices, whereas the wicks of the candle show the high and low prices. Depending on the software you use, if the closing price is higher than the opening price of the previous candle, the candlestick itself will be blue.